6 Ontario Murders That Shocked All Of Canada

Despite all of its beauty, Ontario has been home to some ugly and shameful acts of pure evil.

After mining through the province’s history of serial killers, hired hitmen and family slayings, we compiled these true crime stories about six Ontario murders that shocked all of Canada.

Helmuth Buxbaum

Millionaire nursing-home operator Helmuth Buxbaum made headlines when he was found guilty of first degree murder for arranging the killing of his wife Hanna.

After having a stroke Buxbaum took up a million dollar a year habit of cocaine and hookers. Hanna voiced her objections to Buxbaum’s new interests. Buxbaum responded to these objections by hiring a hitman to kill his wife.

In July of 1984, Buxbaum pulled over to the side of a highway near London, Ontario, to allow Gary Foshay, the hired killer, to drag Hanna from the car and shoot her three times in the head.

Helmuth Buxbaum was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years.

Buxbaum died in the Kingston Penetentiary in 2007. He’s now buried next to his murdered wife in Campbell Cemetery in Komoka, Ontario.

The Shafia Murders

Devout Muslim and polygamist Mohammad Shafia took the lives of his three teenage daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 as well as his first wife Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, on June 30, 2009 in Kingston, Ontario.

All four women were found dead that morning, submerged at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, trapped inside a black Nissan Sentra .

Prior to their murders, Shafia’s daughters heavily embraced Western culture, getting piercings, painting their nails and dating boys.

Apparently, this conflicted with Shafia’s views on the teachings of Islam, angering Shafia to the point of conducting the ruthless and barbaric “honour killing.”

In 2012, after a three month trial, Mohammad Shafia was found guilty of first-degree murder. His second wife Tooba Yahya and his eldest son Hamed were also found guilty of first-degree murder for their involvement in the crime.

All three were all sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years. Shafia and Yahya will be deported from Canada to Afghanistan when their sentence is complete.

Gerald Thomas Archer

Dubbed ‘The London Chambermaid Slayer’, Gerald Thomas Archer was a Canadian serial killer from London, Ontario.

Archer was convicted of the murder of Belva Russell, 57, a chambermaid from Chatham, Ontario. She was found by her common-law husband, Reginald Tomlinson, beaten to death in their apartment on January 23, 1971.

Police laid charges after Mr. Tomlinson was able to identify the killer in a line-up. Archer had ran past Mr. Tomlinson on the night of the murder, in the stairwell of the apartment building, minutes after killing Belva.

Gerald Thomas Archer was sentenced to life in prison. He was granted parole in 1985 and lived for 10 years as a drifter before dying in 1995 of a heart attack.

Following his death, Archer’s former wife and daughter both informed police that he had admitted to killing Edith Authier, a woman murdered in London, Ontario in 1969.

Police exhumed Archer’s body in 2000 and using a DNA sample they were able to connect him to two previously unsolved cases. The first being the murder of Edith Authier and the second, Jane Wooley, 62. All three women were killed in similar fashion.

 

The Bathtub Girls

Two teen killers, then 15 and 16, nicknamed ‘The Bathtub Girls’, murdered their mother in Mississauga, Ontario on January 18, 2003.

The two sisters fed their mother an overwhelming mixture of alcohol and pills. Once their mother was incapacitated they helped her into the bathtub, then forced her head underwater until she was dead.

Apparently, the girls were unhappy with their mother’s alcohol use and home life. The girls figured that following their mother’s killing they would collect insurance money and would be better off.

They might have gotten away with the crime, which was originally ruled as accidental, had they not bragged about their plot prior to the murder and afterwards.

‘The Bathtub Girls’ received a youth sentence of 10 years, with a six-year incarceration maximum.

Both girls are now free and it’s been recently reported that the youngest sister has been studying to become a lawyer.

Johnson Aziga

Uganda-born immigrant and ex-Hamilton, Ontario resident Johnson Aziga is the first person in Canada to be convicted of first-degree murder for knowingly spreading the HIV virus.

Diagnosed with HIV in 1996, Aziga went on to have unprotected sex with multiple women over the course of seven years, hiding the fact that he was HIV-positive from his partners.

Eleven women came forward, seven of whom had contracted the disease from Aziga. Two of the victims died due to HIV-related cancers, shortly after his arrest in 2003.

In 2009, Aziga was found guilty as charged of two counts of murder in the first degree, 10 counts of aggravated sexual assault, and one count of attempted aggravated sexual assault.

Johnson Aziga was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. However, in 2011, a request was granted to classify Aziga as a dangerous offender and he will now be jailed indefinitely as per the Dangerous Offenders Act.

Peter Demeter

The subject of the longest trial in Canadian history, Peter Demeter was convicted in December, 1974 for arranging the murder of his wife and former fashion model Christine Demeter.

Christine was found on July 18, 1973, with her skull bashed in, sprawled face-down on the cement floor in the garage of their Mississauga, Ontario home.

Demeter had organized a hitman to murder his wife in an effort to collect on her $1 million life insurance policy. He was also unhappy in his marriage to Christine, and banging Marina Hundt, his then-29 year old mistress.

Following his conviction, Peter Demeter was sentenced to life imprisonment. To this day he maintains his innocence, saying the his financial sense would not have allowed him to murder someone in their home, as it would have lowered the property value.

Christine’s actual killer, said to be small-time Hungarian criminal Imre “The Duck” Olejnyik, was never found.

Peter Demeter’s ride didn’t end there, though. He was given a second life sentence in 1985 after it was found that he had conspired to kidnap and murder his cousin’s son, then-20 year old Stuart Demeter.

He was charged again in 1988 for plotting to kidnap and murder the daughter of his lawyer, Tony Belman, due to a dispute over financial matters. For his efforts he received two more life sentences.